Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T12:48:23.029Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Inturned

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Extract

Sylvia Beach (1887–1962) is remembered primarily for the two feats of which she was proudest, publishing Ulysses and “STEERing a little bookshop for about twenty-two years between the two wars,” as she puts it in the text reprinted here. Her “little bookshop,” Shakespeare and Company, was for Ernest Hemingway “a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living” (35). In 1919, with support from Adrienne Monnier, the owner of a neighboring bookstore, Beach launched the Left Bank shop that would serve as a hub for French and expatriate writers.1 In her 1959 memoir, Shakespeare and Company, Beach tells stories of her friends and patrons, who included F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, Paul Valéry, Simone de Beauvoir, HD (Hilda Doolittle), Samuel Beckett, and many others. Beach also describes there her other great feat, the publication of Ulysses. When British and American printers were prevented from publishing Joyce's Dublin epic because it was considered too obscene, Beach stepped in. Her fortuitous situation as a seller of English-language books in Paris inspired her to risk bringing out Ulysses herself. In February 1922, after a legendary struggle, the first edition of Ulysses appeared under the imprint “Shakespeare and Company.”

Type
Little-known Documents
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Beach, Sylvia. “Inturned.” [c. 1959–62]. MS C0141. Folder 11. Jackson Matthews Collection of Sylvia Beach, Manuscripts Div., Dept. of Rare Bks. and Spec. Collections, Princeton U Lib.Google Scholar
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. New York: Harcourt, 1959. Print.Google Scholar
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. Print.Google Scholar
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. New York: Norton, 1983. Print.Google Scholar
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. 1964. New York: Scribner's, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Yitzak. Vittel Diary. N.p.: Hakibbutz Hameuchad; Ghetto Fighters', 1972. Print.Google Scholar
Maddox, Brenda. Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce. London: Hamilton, 1988. Print.Google Scholar
Scott, Bonnie Kime. Joyce and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Print.Google Scholar
Shloss, Carol Loeb. Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake. New York: Farrar, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Adrienne, Monnier. “Americans in Paris.” The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier. Trans. Richard McDougall. 1976. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1996. 413–17. Print.Google Scholar